Or,
Why Realism Isn’t the Only (or Best) Way To Be “Classical”
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| I Quattro Compagni Martiri, S. Cresci in Valcava, Borgo S. Lorenzo, FI |
I
recently had the pleasure of painting a modest fresco for a rural church in Tuscany, a place where I’ve painted several others over the last decade and a
half. While the actual painting process was rocky—from a first giornata that went from bad to worse, to
a second (and ultimately only) giornata
in a raging wind and rain storm—the reception two weeks later was lovely.
Indeed, the communal dinner al fresco
on 20 July was Italy at its best, from the community pitching in for everything
from food to table setup (and cleanup), to the local priest singing vespers
with harpsichord accompaniment, then to his blessing of the fresco, to his
de-vesting for the subsequent concert of 18th century music where he
played a fine violin duet with the harpsichordist. Beautiful, tasteful, exuberant,
faithful, this is the Italy I romance and remind myself of constantly when I’m
otherwise made aware of all her problems. Despite what some might say, the
problem isn’t the Italians, it’s Italy (whatever that “geographical
expression”
means).
But
since my stormy giornata resulted in
a particularly painterly exercise in compressing four heads into one niche, I
feel compelled to say something about the painterly, the Grand Manner, and the
classical. And first I must acknowledge the truly remarkable flowering of
realist technique happening mostly in America. It suits our “know-how,”
“git-‘er-done”, demystification-of-everything mentality, recently in evidence
in the frankly weird film Tim’s Vermeer.
But it has almost nothing to do with what was understood as classical painting
from the dawn of the Renaissance until perhaps J-L David at the end of the 18th
century. While realism had a place in that tradition, a better word for what
was valued was naturalism, the sense that what was represented appeared
credible, natural. This was because most of what was painted, apart from
portraiture, was actually invented—there was nothing in fact “real” about
Correggio’s ceiling frescoes or Titian’s monumental canvases. They were, first
of all, paintings, and secondly they were of scenes that had to be imagined,
since they came from the Bible, or the lives of saints long gone, and not
ordinary life out in the street. What mattered was that the paintings were
beautiful (reality often is not), that they were iconographically decorous, and
that they fit their architectural context.
The
reason so few today think in these terms (I can’t even count on one hand the
artists who think like I do) is that success is much more nebulous, and risky,
when one privileges the act of painting instead of depicting follicle by
follicle the hair on the head of a portrait from life. But,
I’m sorry to say, that is rendering, not painting. One has only to get up close
to a great Italian Baroque fresco to see the artist’s hand at work, creating
from a distance the illusion of form but up close reveling in the act of
painting itself. I suspect the reason so few artists today care to work that
way is that so few connoisseurs are out there, unlike three hundred years ago,
who can appreciate the art of it. Instead, most customers for realism want what
the painters offer, something tending toward the photograph, but with just
enough paint to suggest a human being made this: but not too much of that hand
at the expense of counting the hairs on the figure’s head; or too much rhetoric
to get in the way of a kind of quasi-puritanical minimalism.
Instead,
my heroes are those titans of three hundred years ago who were in demand all
over Europe—Baccicio, Giaquinto, Ricci, Pittoni, Tiepolo. Their work still
impresses for its verisimilitude, but not its veracity. They were painters, and
even the harbinger of doom for the Grand Manner and its regime of taste, Denis
Diderot, said about painting:
"The
value of creating resemblance is passing; it is that of the brush[stroke] which
causes us to marvel in the moment, and then renders the work eternal."
—Denis
Diderot, "Salon de 1763"
(Le
merite de ressembler est passager; c'est celui du pinceau qui emerveille dans
le moment et qui eternise l'ouvrage.)
Forthcoming: The Power of Images: The Iconography of the
S. Cresci Frescoes
